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With Shame Remembered (1978) by Bill Beatty
`With Shame Remembered’ is a short account by Bill Beatty on the history of `Transportation’, the policy of transporting petty criminals as well as hardened felons from 18th Century Britain to Australia. Often a horrifying story of cruelty, but also lighter moments. It has often been assumed that the transported convicts were all habitual criminals, the scum of Britain, sent away in the enlightened hope that life in a distant colony would reform them into useful citizens.
In reality, the death rates, immorality, brutality and even accounts of cannibalism, as well as the effects of the British policy on the Aboriginal population, leave a picture of `man’s inhumanity to man’, if not on the same scale, in the same spirit of Nazi Germany and the concentration camps.
Additionally, the governorship of New South Wales in the early days seems to have rested largely in the hands of the clergy, who also served as magistrates. Sentences were so harsh, the Rev. Dr. Lang, newly arrived, described them tellingly as `flaying the flock alive’. Any humanity on the part of clergy, such as the mild-mannered Rev. Richard Johnson, appears the exception, not the rule, and certainly with no official encouragement.
Australia’s convict history has more recently been explored in Robert Hughes’ excellent `The Fatal Shore ‘ although at 748 pages, considerably more daunting. Sian Rees, in her books `The Floating Brothel’, and `The Ship Thieves’, writes with an immediacy that brings the characters to life. We should not forget these events, and Bill Beatty and the other writers are to be commended.